Lightroom Library Organisation?

rotherad

rotherad

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Name
David Rothera
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi guys (and girls ofcourse),

After taking a trawl through my various hard drives I have found that all my pics seem to be strewn all over the place, even though I use Lightroom (which at least makes it easy to see all the photo's in one place) I would like to over the next few months try and get a uniformed structure to how I store them put together.

Would anyone like to share how they manage to store all their 1000's of pictures and still be able to find that one particular picture without using Lightroom/Bridge etc.
 
When I import photos from my CF cards, I do it like this:

2007
2008
2009
\___> yy_mm_dd_Description

So I have one toplevel folder for each year, and each import goes into a folder with the naming pattern yy_mm_dd_Description

The description is usually a one-worder, as that's normally enough to spark off the memory. On import I'll usually throw in some location keywords, and work from there. At least then all the files are stored in a date heirarchy, keeping them somewhat organised.

WIthin each yy_mm_dd_Description folder I have three more folders, RAW, Print and Web, which contain, well, RAWs, TIFF/JPG ready for print, and websize jpgs. Job done.
 
2007
2008
2009
\___> yy_mm_dd_Description

I do this as well. Where the description is something like, "Product Corona" or "MCG Coll vs Ess" (last two in my library) so it's fairly obvious what's in there.

I add a heap of keywords on import into LR, so they work well for finding individual photos if I can't remember the approximate date I shot it.

I then also have a few collections for projects I'm working on, eg. The Gatwick Hotel, that I've been shooting for the past few months. Here I can collect the best from each day's shoot as I go along. Collections also allow you to chop and change the order of photos, which is great for organising a story.

I keep raw files with their edits like that, then for any specific output I'll export them to PS for final prep, and then delete the finals after the job. (Leaving the raws in LR obviously).
 
Very similar the above posts - sorted by year, then YY-MM identifier plus descriptive name plus counter. I never remember to do keywords but then bung anything good into a collection. I've 12,000 shots near enough and if I cannot find the shot by date or in a collection it really doesn't take too long to skim through a years' worth of shots in the grid-view. I guess this will get harder with time and when I forget the year of the shot.
 
Yeah I think the main problem for me was the I have the YYYY/YYMMDD_descrip for the RAW's themselves but everything else has gone to crap, suppose I will actually have to take some time to sort everything out.

Do any of you guys that use Lightroom cut your catalog off and start a new one, say every year or dont you think there is a need?
 
I will when it starts slowing down Lightroom but I haven't seen any evidence of that yet. I figure splitting will make it harder to find a shot. I've seen pros that split out their work and private catalogues though.
 
I was just about to start a post about splitting Lightroom catalogues, but seeing as this is here already...

I simply organise my photos in folders by date on my hard drive as they are imported by Lightroom. I basically let Lightroom sort it out much as the respondents above.

I then use Lightroom collections and collection sets to put my photos into context, along with keywords. It really is essential to keyword your photos on import and during your post-processing work otherwise you'll never find the buggers.

I can therefore find my photos in two ways - by checking in my collections (i.e. I'll have a collection for each event, each sports match etc, and also collections for genres like urban, monochrome etc), and also by keyword.

Today I split my catalogue into 3. It was up to 15,000 images and things were starting to run slow, especially Develop. Splitting the catalogue was pretty easy. I decided to put all my Sports stuff in one catalogue, all my Events into another one, and left everything else in the original catalogue. Generally I'll know if I am looking for a Sports image, an Events image, or something else, so I'm not overly worried about not being able to find pics across the 3 catalogues.

To split the catalogue, I selected all the photos in the relevant collection set and did "export to catalogue" (or "catalog") and off they went. The new catalogues have all the collections and collection sets transferred over with no problem. Once I was happy all the photos were there, I deleted them out of the original catalogue (note - "Removed photos from Lightroom" rather than deleting them from disk!!!). Everything is nice & fast as a result. What a relief.

If I need to, I'll then start archiving off older photos to separate catalogues e.g. "Events 2007-8" etc.

Now, a nice little tip for you. To switch catalogues in Lightroom, Lightroom has to close and then re-open. This is a pain. So what I have done is associate the .lrcat filenames of the 3 catalogues with Lightroom 2.3. I then put shortcuts to those .lrcat files on my taskbar. I can now open a catalogue just by clicking on a shortcut. If Lightroom is already open in another catalogue, it closes and then re-opens the requested catalogue. All much easier than clicking menus and stuff.

Tobers
 
I've around 58,000 images in my LR catalogue - does take a second or two to start up, but runs smoothly enough...

If you're thinking of splitting your catalogue up, just make sure you have a backup incase you hit the "Delete from Disk" option by mistake!!
 
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